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Tale of two Lit fests: Sunita Williams’ Kerala visit ignites a high-stakes literary showdown

The Kanpur communal riots broke out while the Karachi Congress session was on in 1931. 400 people were killed in this riot. The Congress leadership appointed a committee to look into the riot. AG Noorani refers to the report by this committee in his article on hate speech and the SC. Bhagwan Das was the chairman of this committee. Purshottam Das Tandon, Mazhar Ali Sokhte, Abdul Latif Bijnori and Zafarul Malik were the members. It must also be recalled that Sardar Patel was the President of Congress then. The committee came to this conclusion: 'It will be noted that all the main controversies which at present embitter and have latterly divided the two communities, for example, the cow question, Ramlila and Moharram, and other religious occasions or processions, music before mosques; as also the question of representation in services, in municipalities and councils, joint and separate electorate; safeguards; redistribution of provinces and federal, as opposed to a unitary, basis of the constitution - all these did not and could not have existed during the Muslim period. They are all products of the British period and British policy.' It is this statement that should be the guiding light for Indian democracy.

Many historians including Romila Thapar have pointed out that the two-nation theory, which accuses the Muslims of raising the demand for a separate nation, has been the product of British colonial historians. This theory was built upon the premises of the extrapolations of James Mill whose work on the history of British India was published in 1817. This proposition of the colonial historians found flavour with Savarkar and Jinnah. The same dogma is allegedly spread by the anti-social elements in contemporary India. The Indian Muslims have rejected this theory emphatically. They stood by Gandhiji and Nehru not by Jinnah. That is why they decided to stay back in India when the nation gained independence in 1947. Their choice was India, not Pakistan. It was a well-thought-out announcement that they were preferring the secular state to a theocratic one. The makers of the Constitution made it crystal clear that the minorities will enjoy equal rights in the Republic of India.